vjorley seems to be using terms like "necessity" in an odd fashion. I assume he is trying to use it the way Demski does in sense like "law of nature".
Oh and I second that nomination of Richard Swinburne (he is a retired Oxford philosophy professor) and was one of the most influential modern Christian philosophers.

Hey Jack Scanlan. You seem to have wandered into my neck of the woods (which is physics and math). I'd love to debate you on fine-tuning and the beginning of the universe sometime soon (this week??). We can lay out our arguments and have a blog exchange on the existence of God.

If evolution was disproven , would you renounce your belief in atheism?
I doubt. You would probably gather more evidence and look at another model or change your model to fit eidence. RTB would probably do the same

The topic was "Was Darwin wrong?"
Even if God did not heal amputees and was an all around meanie this would have nothing to do with Darwin's theory and whether it was correct. You pointing out a flaw of religion does not automatically count as evidence for Darwin's theory.

[The authority of the bible is questionable because there isn't other sources dictating who wrote the parts of the bible]Do you know this or are you just asserting it? Anyway there are other sources (Papias, iraneous, Justin Martyr to name a few) who affirm the authorship of the gospels.
AS I said if you want to prove the bible was written by goatherders find bunch of copies of the gospels attributed to Bill the goatherder instead of Matthew and Mark and you are in business.

[Wow - this is ground breaking stuff! ]
Nah, its not groundbreaking , you are just ignorant of population demographics .
(Heck the fact that life expectancy increases with age is true even in modern America http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/07.20/10...
[Who would have thought that as the age of people went up, so did their life expectancy.]
All the social scientists and people who study this. did you even look at the table from the last post?(or are you just too angry that you were proven wrong?)
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/Li...

I did. It is part of the westminister confession and several Catholic creeds. God being a spirit, is not made of material and thus cannot have any parts.
In this way the wiki definition 'COMPLEXITY is used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement." cannot apply to him.

1)My point was it was not the principal method of communication back then. Oral tradition and memorisation was sufficient to spread it.
2)[You don't find it at all odd that they waited 30 years before puttin pen to paper?]
Yes , as I said, paper was not the main method of communication back then.
As for life expectancy in roman times you can check here
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/Li...
Average life expectancy tends to increase with age.

The fact is that every surviving attribution of the plays says Shakespeare wrote it so it is reasonable to assume he did. The same with the gospels and their writers. If you want to go do an archeological dig and find copies of gospels with attributed to goatherders please do so.

askegg made the claim that zombies contradict science. I was asking him to support this claim. Seems he flubbed a little there.